The unkindest cut: a visionary guidance counselor in a poor urban high school discovers why some top colleges don't want even his best students: money.

• Author: Vlanton, Elias
• Position: Hold Fast to Dreams: A College Guidance Counselor, His Students, and the Vision of a Life Beyond Poverty - Book review

Hold Fast to Dreams: A College Guidance Counselor, His Students, and the Vision of a Life Beyond Poverty

by Joshua Steckel and Beth Zasloff

New Press, 320 pp.

It sometimes feels like low-income students are to our K-12 education system what cadavers are to hospitals. Often teachers secure their first jobs in challenging schools in poorer districts, where the turnover rate is high. Here, they hone their teaching skills, and in a few years they trade up to districts with higher salaries and better working conditions. Poor students are left behind to train the next crop of educators.

Joshua Steckel, coauthor of Hold Fast to Dreams: A College Guidance Counselor, His Students, and the Vision of a Life Beyond Poverty, intentionally went the other way. After four years at Birch Wathen Lenox, an expensive private school on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Steckel became a college counselor (and sometime teacher) at an overwhelmingly poor, black, and Latino public school in Brooklyn, the Secondary School for Research (now called Park Slope Collegiate). Once there, he used the skills and connections he had developed at Lenox to help get his new charges admitted to some of the country's more selective colleges.

Along with his wife and coauthor, Beth Zasloff, Steckel chronicles his relationship with ten of his students, from their senior year of high school into young adulthood. The stories are invaluable both to educators who deal with children from similar backgrounds and to non-educators, who often don't appreciate the overwhelming odds stacked against poor children. The first chapters cover the students' past and Steckel's experiences with them in high school; subsequent chapters cover post-high school struggles; the final chapters talk about the students in their early twenties. Each chapter is satisfying on its own, but the reader is eager to find out what happens next in these students' lives.

I have taught for more than fifteen years in a Maryland public high school that has demographics similar to those at the Secondary School, and a colleague and I similarly shepherded promising students to selective residential colleges. Steckel's stories remind me of my own. Hold Fast neither exaggerates nor minimizes what these kids are faced with. Steckel and Zasloff write about the rawness and trauma of the working poor, the family life constantly disrupted by parents' late-night shifts, long hours at work, and unstable employment. Some of Steckel's students...